Emerging Themes
Considering the embryonic stage of Healthcare IT overall, it’s no surprise that there are multiple loosely-defined phrases are being used to describe emerging trends, products and services. This page is an ongoing list of some of these rudimentary themes and buzzwords. Sometimes they are valid concepts that point to a viable new pattern. Sometimes they are marketing messages propagated through important or technical sounding terms, mostly to impress laypersons. Irrespective of the underlying intention, each potentially serves as a data point in the collective experimentation, definition and evolution happening in the innovation microcosm of Healthcare Information Technology. This list is maintained primarily with an intention to catalog, not to endorse or validate. Take each item with a grain of salt.
Self-aggregation, Self-reporting, Social discovery
Benchmarking
Stick-to-the-schedule Support
Influencing Microchoices
Knowledge Discovery from Online Sources
Self-selection, Self-diagnosis, Self-referral
Enhanced Data Entry
Local clinical workflows are being taken over by EHRs, and clinicians spend a lot of time begrudgingly entering data into tedious forms and templates. A number of startups are trying to make this easier, by creating a usable, more efficient layer between the end-user and the incumbent EHR user interface. At the heart of these new offerings are technologies like NLP and Speech Recognition. Examples: Dragon Medical by Nuance, Health Fidelity (based on Columbia’s MedLEE engine), Medicomp, MModal, CliniThink (you can find the complete ongoing list on Multiplyd Wiki). An interesting offshoot is Tonic Health which enhances non-clinical data entry for patients, providing an interesting ‘consumer engagement’ value proposition.
Niche EHRs
Thanks to HITECH and Healthcare Reform, EHRs are conventional Healthcare IT tools and mainstream EHR founders are billionaires. Perhaps its logical that the pendulum to swing from one-size-fits-all approach to niche EHRs. Peripheral players providing ancillary care services are becoming technology aware and, in turn, attracting vendor attention. Most of these are small-to-mid size companies that are apt acquisition target for the incumbent behemoths. Examples:
- First response focused (e.g. for natural disasters, mass casualties, etc.): Beyond Lucid
- School/Education focused: CareDox, CareFlow
- Physical Therapy: WebPT
- Orthopedic: ModMed,
- Dermatology: ModMed
- Chiropractic: WonderDoc, MyChartsOnline
- Oncology: Elekta
- Gastroenterology: GMed
- Plastic Surgery: ModMed
- Cardiovascular: Medstreaming
- Cosmetic Surgery: ModMed
- Opthalmology: MedFlow, ModMed
- ObGyn: Medstreaming
- Urgent Care: DocuTap, Practice Velocity, Codonix
- ENT: EHRforENT, ModMed
- Long-Term Care: As of last count, there were 19 vendors in this space. Names: PointClickCare, SigmaCare, AOD, BlueStep, 6N EMR, ADL Data, aLMSa, American Data, Galaxy, HCS, HealthcareFirst, HealthMedX, NTT Data, Lintech, MDI MatrixCare, HiTech, PioneerRx, Optimus, SOS. A good 2012 industry analysis is here.
Quantified-self Data Aggregators
General trend of quantified self-help tools is giving way to offerings that aggregate the data from multiple such tools. That’s right. Not the sensor-based devices, but aggregators of those devices. These solutions that aim to collate multiple self-quantification devices (like fitbit, zeo, fuelband etc.) are emerging from the unexplored abyss of Health 2.0. Examples: Sandalbay Life, TicTrac, Paco,Validic, HumanAPI, Vivametrica, Tidepool (for diabetes)